THE NEW YORKER At the tIme of my story, the elder lady lived v/ith Julia, who was widowed, and with Julia's son. Mrs. Jáuregui went on hating bygone tyrants-Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza. The First World War, which made her loathe the Ger- mans, about whom she knew very little, was less real to her than the revolu- tion of 1890 and, needless to say, the cavalry charge at Big Hill. Since 1932, she had been growing diIn- mer and diInmer; COInInon metaphors are the best, be- cause they are the only true ones. She was, of course, a Catholic, which does not necessarily Inean that she believed in a God that is One and is Three, or even in an afterlife. While her hands moved over her ro- sary, she muttered prayers that she had never under- stood. In place of Easter and of Twelfth Night she had accepted Christmas, just as she had grown to accept tea instead of maté. To her, the word" "Prot- " " l " " F estant, ew, ree- " " h ." d " I . " mason, eretIc, an at 1E'ISt were synonyms and empty of meaning. While she could still talk, she spoke not of Spaniard" but of godoç, or Goths, just as her ancestors had done. Du ring the Centennial, in 1910, she could hardly believe that the Spanish Infanta-who, after all, was a prin- cess-spoke, against all expectation, like a COInman Spaniard and not like an Argentine lady; it was at her son-in- law's wake that a rich relative, who had never set foot in the J aUI egui house but whose naIne they avidly sought in the society pages of the newspapers, gave her the disquieting news. Many of the place names that Mrs. J áuregui used had long since been altered; she still spoke of such streets as Las Artes, Temple, Buen Orden, La Piedad, the two Calles Largas, and of the Plaza del Parque and the Portones. The faInily affected these archaisIns, which in hel were spontaneous. They spoke of "Orientales" instead of "Uruguayans." Mrs. J áuregui never went out of the house after 1921; perhaps she never suspected that Buenos AIres had been changing and growing. First meInories are the most vivid. The city that she pictured beyond her front door may well have been a much earlier one than .... 1-:5 jJ -\ CÎ-.( IT 47 /,- '1 /' ./ -:::---. -/ (J -- ..----- -----.:... JI '-)tH "It seems a tragzc 1J.Jaste 1))hen you consider what RalpJ z Nader's intelligence and drive mig-ht have accomplished tn some leg-itimate walk of ltfe" . that of the time they were forced to move froIn the center of town out to Palermo. If so, to her the oxen that hauled wagons still rested In the square of the Once, and dead violets still spread their fragrance among the gar- den" of Barracas. "Now all Iny dreaIns are of dead people" was one of the last things she was heard to say. No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never- enjoyed the pleasures of the Inind; the last pleasures left her would be those of IneInory and, later on, of forgetfulness. She had al- ways been generous. I recall her bright, quiet eyes and her smile. Who knows what tllInult of passions-now lost hut which once burned-there had been in that old woman; in her dav, she had been quite pleasant-looking. Sensitive to plants, whose modest and silent life was so akin to her own, she looked after some begonias in her room and touched their leaves, which she could no longer see. Up until 1929, the year in which she sank into a kind of half sleep, she recounted historical happenings, but al- ways using the saIne words in the same order, as if they were the Lord's Prayer, so that I grew to suspect there were no longer any real images behind theIn. Even eating one thing or another . was all the SaIne to her. She was, ln short, happy. S LEEPING, as we all know, is the Inost secret of our acts. We devo '-e a third of our lIves to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it is no more than an eclipse of wakefulness; for oth- ers, a more c(Hnplex state spanning at one and the saIne time past, present, and future; for still others, an uninter- rupted series of dreaIns. To say that Mrs. ] áuregui spent ten years in a quiet chaos is perhaps mistaken; each InOInent of those ten years may well have been a pure present, without a be- fore or after. There is no reason to Inarvel at such a present, which we count by days and nights and hy the hundreds of leaves of Inany calendars and by anxieties and events; it is what we go through every Inorning before waking up and every nIght before fall- ing asleep. Twice each day, we are all the elder lady. The J áuregui family lived, as we have already seen, in a somewhat false situation. They felt they belonged to the aristocracy, but the people spoken of in the society column knew nothing whatever about theIn; thev were de- scendan ts of a founding father, but